Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 2 #

Thursday morning started with an interesting talk on open source collaboration tools and how they can help resolving some collaboration overhead on commercial software projects. Four goals can be reached with the help of the right tools: Sharing the project vision, tracking the current status of the project, finding places to help the project and documenting the project history as well as the reasons for decisions along the way. The exact tool used is irrelevant as long as it helps to solve the four tasks above.

The second talk was on cloud architectures by Steve Loughran. He explained what reasons there are to go into the cloud, what a typical cloud architecture looks like. Steve described Amazon’s offer, mentioned other cloud service providers and highlighted some options for a private cloud. However his main interest is in building a standardised cloud stack. Currently choosing one of the cloud provides means vendor lock-in: Your application uses a special API, your data are stored on special servers. There are quite a few tools necessary for building a cloud stack available at Apache (Hadoop, HBase, CouchDB, Pig, Zookeeper…). The question that remains is how to integrate the various pieces and extend where necessary to arrive at a solution that can compete with AppEngine or Azure?

After lunch I went to the Solr case study by JTeam. Basically one great commercial for Solr. They even brought the happy customer to Apache Con to talk about the experience of Solr from his point of view. Great work, really!

The Lightning Talk session ended the day - with a “Happy birthday to you” from the community.

After having spent the last 4 days from 8a.m. to 12p.m. at Apache Con I really did need some rest on Thursday and went to bed pretty early: At 11p.m. …